Skyhorse Publishing
ISBN 9781510772564
$19.99 504 pages
tradepaper
Link to the Marshall Project on the Attica Riots and Malcolm Bell’s work
The book is available wherever books are sold. To order a book
WITNESS THE SHAM OF JUSTICE AS TOLD BY THE PROSECUTOR WHO SOUGHT TO INDICT POLICE FOR THE TORTURES AND MURDERS THE STATE WAS ONLY PRETENDING TO PROSECUTE.
The Attica Turkey Shoot tells a story that New York State did not want you to know. In 1971, following a prison riot at the Attica Correctional Facility, state police and prison guards slaughtered thirty-nine hostages and inmates and tortured more than one thousand men after they had surrendered. State officials pretended that they could not successfully prosecute the law officers who perpetrated this carnage, and then those same officials scurried for shelter when a prosecutor named Malcolm Bell exposed the cover-up.
Bell traveled a rocky road to a justice of sorts as he sought to prosecute without fear or favor—in spite of a deck that the officials had stacked to keep the police from facing the same justice that had filled the Attica prison in the first place. His insider’s account illuminates the all-too-common contrast between the justice of the privileged and the justice of the rest.
Newly revised and available for the first time in paperback, the book also includes evidence from recently uncovered tapes that Governor Nelson Rockefeller knew his order for troopers to attack could cost the lives of hundreds of inmates and all those hostages. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the scrutiny it has brought to America’s police forces and the criminal justice system, The Attica Turkey Shoot highlights the hypocrisy of a system that decides who goes to prison and who enjoys impunity in a nation where no one is said to be above the law.
Reviews
“My book simply couldn’t have been written, nor could Attica’s many victims received any sort of justice, without the bravery that Malcolm Bell showed long ago when he blew the whistle on the state’s efforts to protect law enforcement ugliness during the retaking of that prison on Sept.13, 1971. . . . It is a real gift to us all that Malcolm’s . . . firsthand account of how [the Attica prosecution] unfolded, is being published once again.”
—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“In the small canon of whistleblower literature, the book is a classic, a kind of nonfiction police procedural whose protagonist is initially overwhelmed by doubts and confusion, only to be filled with outrage once he realizes that justice has been purposely thwarted.”
—Tom Robbins, The Marshall Project
“We are the jury as Mr. Bell presents clear evidence of a police riot in retaking Attica, of monstrous inhumanity in the aftermath, and of a subsequent cover-up emanating from the highest levels of government…. A courageous Mr. Bell reveals the shocking details of his long and arduous journey towards justice.”
—Martin Sheen, actor and political activist
“Malcolm Bell tells a story America desperately needs to know…. The Attica prison rebellion… the Presidential ambitions of one of the nation’s wealthiest men, public fear and hatred of imprisoned convicts, police murders followed by weeks of torture and brutality, form the caldron in which a lawyer’s character was to be tested…. Malcolm Bell has written a bristling narrative, faithful to fact, full of hot emotion and cool reason in which conscience born of love prevails. Read it. ”
—Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the United States